Should Men Be Allowed to Have More Than One Wife?

Argumentative Essay “Man fi have, nuff gal and gal ina bungle, gal from Rema and gal from Jungle…” Is a popular song by Jamaican reggae artiste Beenie Man. The song suggests that men should have multiple partners, a belief to which many Jamaican men also subscribe. A man having more than one wife is called Polygyny a form of polygamy that has been much debated in a lot of countries for years. Polygyny although illegal in Jamaica, remains acceptable in many cultures who argues that it should be practiced here.

However, Men should not be allowed to have more than one wife in Jamaica as this would cause our morals and values to deteriorate and contribute to more troubled marriages which will have a negative impact on the children produced by these marriages. Polygyny is a form of polygamy in which a man has more than one wife (oxford dictionary); helps in the deterioration of moral beliefs and values which will affect our structured system negatively.

Polygyny is In a highly Christian based country such as Jamaica men being allowed to have more than one wife will significantly fail from uplifting our moral beliefs of a stable family unit of one man, one woman and children. According to the BOHRD (2011), Christianity contributes to more than half the religious population. This religious group firmly believes that Polygyny should not be practiced and a marriage is the union between one man and one woman in which we as a country has adopted.

To start allowing men to be able to have more than one wife will only deteriote our moral standards and belisfs. in almost every country where polygamy is practiced it is only polygyny which is allowed and women marrying more than one man are forbidden. Right there is a violation gender inequality as enshrined in (OECD. 2010) a . This act will promote a hypocritical and biased society when it comes to issues of men vs women and hence will promote the abuse of our women. Polygamy also caused many problems within the home between the two wives.

Usually there is at least one wife who is not happy with the arrangement. This is because the new wife is usually younger and has more to offer than the first wife. This jealousy causes a lot of friction in polygamist marriages. If the man buys something for one wife he needs to get something for the other. Even with buying something for both wives one of them often claims that the other received something better. The same thing is true for what he buys for each of their children. This impossibility of satisfying multiple wives at the same time causes many conflicts in polygamist marriages.

The results of these conflicts are anywhere from the mistreatment of the others children to trying to convince her husband to divorce the other wife. This is so common that in Eastern Africa if two wives of the same man get along together people say that he must have used magic on them to accomplish this. Do you see a man having multiple wives to be any particular benefit to females, or is the benefit largely to the male “husband? ” And in this economy, many men cannot afford to maintain one household and family, let alone two or three equally for each wife.

How can broke men aspire to be polygynous when they do not have the wealth to meet the standards of such a situation? Children from such families can no longer earn good education; for there is little to go round among three-four households. They can not afford a balanced meal; being subsistence farmers, who relay on the bounty of the land, when drought heats, they will have to go without food if they don’t get from charitable people who are also short. Women turn to have less self esteem, they see themselves through the male’s eyes. hen a woman stands by the mirror instead of seeing herself through her own imagination, she thinks of how he will see her, so she is using his imagination, to define herself-worthy. In my opinion, polygamy served its purpose in those times, but now, it has become the decadence of the family community, and society at large, destroying self-esteem in women, and bringing unmeasurable suffering on children born from such families. There are reports of happy families but these are few and they could be in denial of reality, one would suggest.